The idea of play
to drive team thinking, learning, and problem solving is a topic of great
discussion in both working and teaching environments. It was also a pretty
new concept to me. Working and learning driven by a game format? Learning
new skills though play (Maier, "Novachemů")? It sounds nearly perfect;
all of the 'players' have a goal to work toward, and each of them have
a part to play, teaching and helping the others. Companies like Athenium
LLC have understood that, and have tried to "marry the kind of "messy
learning" that takes place in informal brainstorming sessions with the
formal structure imposed by a game format-rules, deadlines, scores" (Stamps,
50). Athenium has run several testing phases to study this interaction,
and how it works. They set up a forum for teams to discuss the tasks given,
and the tasks were scored on complexity, higher scores where the questions
the teams created made people really think, lower scores for questions
that received immediate consensus. The structure of play encourages interaction,
and gives the teams a goal to work toward. The team environment actually
helps people to better understand sometimes complex workings, and work
collaboratively to achieve the goal (Kumar, 22). This social element is
what brings everything together.